Gojira vs Godzilla

A very interesting comparison between Gojira, the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla that is currently in theatrical re-release in the US and its American counterpart (the one with Raymond Burr) by Kathryn Joyce in The Revealer. The contrasts go beyond culture. Indeed, the religious and spiritual implications of both are incredibly different. One deals with repentance and sacrifice, the other believes that might is right. Guess which is which.

Mr. Monster

Some Koreans nicknamed him Mr. Monster, an affectionate tribute to an eccentric moviemaker and to his equally eccentric and dark films. His real name was Kim Ki-young, and his creations could be the most deliriously and deliciously bizarre films you've ever heard of, much less ever seen. A director who worked within the Korean film industry from the 50s until the 80s, Kim eschewed the sentimental and treacly trappings of the popular and traditional Shinpa dramas (which were actually Japanese in origin) and started his career making films that were influenced by the Italian neo-realists. As his career progressed, Kim began to shed the neo-realism, and his movies started to take a decidedly darker and more gothic turn.

One of Kim's signature films is The Housemaid, a lurid melodrama of lust and domestic chaos. Here's a brief synopsis, courtesy of Chuck Stephens:

The husband, a feckless music teacher, gives piano lessons to the young, rural-born women who staff a local factory; his wife, in addition to raising their bratty son and crippled daughter, takes in sewing to supplement the family income. When hubby asks one of his students to recommend a suitable domestic from among the factory girls, the trouble begins. The student, it seems, has developed a powerful crush on the teacher, and when her advances are spurned, she spitefully recommends a chain-smoking farm girl, Myong-ja, to the family's employ. A panic-eyed succubus, Myong-ja makes her first appearance emerging from the student's closet -- as if directly from the rejected woman's vengeful unconscious -- and immediately begins to sow the seeds of the family's destruction.

Nice! The Housemaid and other important Kim films such as The Insect Woman, Woman on Fire, Killer Butterfly, and his last film Carnivore (great titles!) are not available on video through normal means here in the states, although I suppose they may be available in stores that cater to Asian immigrants. Kim has had some recognition in the west with retrospectives in San Francisco and in Berlin in 1998. Unfortunately, 1998 was also the year he died. As Kim and his wife were preparing for a trip to Berlin to personally attend the retrospective, the house the Kims had recently bought and moved into and which was apparently haunted and ill-omened (doubt appealing to Kim's whimsical sense of the macabre) caught fire due to an electrical short circuit. Kim and his wife both died in the blaze.

With the recent ascension of Korean films in the west, culminating with Park Chan-wook's Old Boy winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, perhaps some enterprising company will attempt to release a Region 0 DVD of Kim's work to an unsuspecting Western audience. Hell, maybe even seeing Park's films at the local video store wouldn't be beyond the pale.

For a ton of info on Kim Ki-Young, point your browser to this site run by a Cinema Studies class at the Korean National University of Arts. The site's in English, and it has bios, filmographies, interviews, reviews, and academic papers galore. Simple, but very well done.

Frankenstein Ad Art

A very nice collection of international advertising art, production stills, and pressbooks from Frankenstein films from 1910 to 1950 can be found on the exemplary B-Movie site from Germany (which has plenty of cool stuff to lose yourself in for at least a couple of hours). Even this Frankenstein fan was astounded to see stuff he's never seen before, like this, and this. Great stuff!

via filmtagebuch, a fine German film blog

"Subject for Further Research"

Just to show that Blood Feast can be a "subject for further research", and inspire odd metanarratives, here's Chris Fujiwara's take on a correspondence between Mr. Fuad Ramses, Egyptian Caterer, and a potential client.

Save Blood Feast!

There's an online petition afloat to protest the court ruling in Germany banning the sale of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast. The 40 year old gore film was declared by a court in Karlsruhe as Gewaltverherrlichung, "promoting violence". The court's seizure edict (Google Translation) details the scenes that contributed to its subsequent banning. Here's one: (23 min.) The murderer suffocates a woman. After (she) is dead...He tears...out the tongue with bare hands. The pulled out tongue as well as the blood-smeared woman...are in close-up...

The scene sounds a lot worse than it plays on film. I remember reading about Lewis' films way before I ever saw them and expecting them to be the most horrid things I could ever imagine. Sure, I saw some stills, and of course I knew his films scraped the bottom of bottom barrel production values and were shot in the wilds of South Florida, but that knowledge just reinforced in me that these movies (especially Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs) were the culmination of some Southern culture of blood, an instance of trailer-park sadism and in-bred hillbilly carnage and killing for kicks (I went through my adolescence in Texas, if that explains anything). Then I found an oversized video box of Blood Feast (Wizard Video) at a local mom and pop video emporium. Shrinkwrapped and garish, the box was shelved next to copies of Faces of Death, Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, and Zombie Lake. I dared myself to pick it up, and then I dared myself to rent it. Two hours later I slid the tape into the VCR. And just 15 minutes later, as I sat on that beat-up couch, beer in hand, I asked myself, is that all there is about Blood Feast?

Is that all there is? Clearly my fears were not justified. While the movie was not without certain primitive charms and had a kind of 1963 motel room aesthetic (the bright colors, the sets), there was nothing horrible about it but its execution. Sure, there was blood and gore, lots of it, but the violence and mayhem was so profoundly unrealistic and so incompetently shot, that horror was the least and the last of the emotions this movie delivered. Simple disgust, maybe, or a risible kind of disdain. In spite of all that (or, most probably, because of it), through the years Blood Feast has garnered a worldwide following (one can safely call it a "cult", although I feel the term has been bandied about and way overused by film critics and pundits in referring to "off-beat" films in that it has become a genre unto itself; moviemakers are writing and lensing films that they consider "cult" without taking into consideration that it's the appreciative and somewhat obsessive audience that makes the "cult" and not their "wacky" skills --The Dark Backward, anyone?). While some may admire the corny and creaky mechanics of the narrative, the Playboy Playmates ("Introducing Connie Mason... you've read about her in Playboy"), or the phony Egyptology, I'm sure the reason for most of Blood Feast's renown and appreciation is simply a matter of history. In 1963, even if it only played in Southern drive-ins, there was nothing in the world like it. The clinical and pornographic way the film portrayed bloodletting and violence shattered movie paradigms and we haven't been the same since. While 1960's Psycho pushed the envelope of film shock and violence, Blood Feast took the envelope, tore it into shreds, formed the pulp into a ball the size of a large Bartlett Pear, and stuck it up your ass. Which does not make Blood Feast a better movie (it's hardly close, on so many levels), but it certainly is important as a historical and cultural document, a precursor, for better or worse, to a new kind of violent film, splatter cinema if you like. While we may think of splatter as cheap and ugly genre films, it's influenced more films than you think, from Saving Private Ryan to The Passion of the Christ.

Which leads us back to the German ban of Blood Feast, which I find unconscionable and, yes, obscene. To deny Germans the right to view this thin historical slice of American schlock is simply wrong, not unlike the British ban on "video nasties". I genuinely hope that the ruling is overturned, or at least reexamined.

For more on the Blood Feast ban, here's a Mobius thread on the story.

International Indian Film Awards

A major film awards ceremony was held yesterday. No, I'm not talking about Cannes (although I've been heartened to find this year's festival having a higher profile here in the US than previous years --no doubt due to the notoriety surrounding Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and it's moving and unprecedented reception at the festival, and, of course, Quentin Tarantino's provocative presence as the jury president-- or perhaps I've been reading too many blogs). I'm referring to the International Indian Film Awards, which were presented in Singapore yesterday. The ceremony's big winner was Kal Ho Naa Ho, a love triangle drama shot in New York, which garnered the best film award. One of its stars, Preity Zinta (who also writes a column for the BBC South Asia page) came away with the Best Actress honors.

I readily admit that I have a severe blindspot when it comes to Indian popular film (although I must admit a fascination with what little snippets I've seen of Indian horror movies and their outlandish set pieces shot with shoe-string abandon), but who's to say that Kal Ho Naa Ho couldn't be a moderate hit in the art-house circuit? The movie is about Indian immigrants in New York and the conflict between old world ties and new world demands, which is, of course, one of the great themes in American art. Of course, this time, Americans didn't make it, but Indians. In spite of Kal Ho Naa Ho's soap opera trappings, the film could lend us a different persective on the immigrant experience, amidst all the hoopla and song and dance numbers.

No Such Animal

There's no such animal, despite what the movie poster on the left may indicate, but Abbott and Costello did meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon, if not in a rip-roaring side-splitting laff-fest meant for the big screen, but on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954. Here's the low-down on that momentous meeting.

Le Theatre du Grand Guignol

A very interesting and informative site on Le Theatre du Grand Guignol, the desecrated chapel turned intimate shoebox of a theater in Paris that specialized in horrific playlets brimming with gore and sadism. Here's a description of one such play:

The innocent Louise is unjustly locked in an asylum with several insane women. A nurse assigned to protect her blithely leaves for a staff party as soon as Louise falls asleep. The insane women decide that a cuckoo bird is imprisoned in Louise's head and and one gouges out her eye with a knitting needle. The other crazy women are freaked and burn the gouger's face off on a hot plate.

Once a major Parisian tourist attraction, it closed in 1962 when more graphic horror films and the grue of real-life rendered the Grand Guignol's little shows and presentations quaint and campy. However, the idea of presenting theatrical beheadings, disembowelings and the like still continue with troupes like the Thrillpeddlers in San Francisco, who translate and adapt original plays from the Grand Guignol's repetroire, and present original pieces of ghastliness as well.

Zombi

Hailing from Pittsburgh, PA, city of steel mills, Carnegie, and, it goes without saying, George Romero, the musical duo Zombi pay tribute to the prog but eeriely minimal soundtracks of 70s and 80s horror films. The horror connection is obvious, as they named themselves after the Italian title for Romero's Dawn of the Dead (music by Goblin, one of their acknowledged influences), and they've even scored a horror film themselves (Home Sick,which is due out this fall and seems a pretty nasty throwback to 70s style grindhouse stomach churners). The music is sort of a throwback to the throbbing and anxious sounds of Argento, Fulci, Carpenter, and, yes, Romero, and yet it stands on its own as it combines retro synths with avant-metal. The fact that Relapse Records is putting out their next album is a definite plus. Downloadable mp3s available on their site.

LLLS 4 Agent of Doom

The Late-Late-Late Show Project, yet another vain attempt to extrapolate meaning, correlations, and unsure and precarious connections from the trailers of painfully obscure European genre films from the 50s and 60s as collected in Something Weird's Late-Late-Late Show VHS compilation, as referenced here. (1) (2) (3)

No.4 Agent of Doom, original French title Un Soir... par Hasard, which roughly translates as One Evening... by Chance. One Belgian site sketches a very brief synopsis, here translated (via Google): At the time of an accident of motor bike, the young atomic scientist André Ségonne is helped by a motorist. He awakes in an unknown house. A series of unexplainable phenomena soon will transform its life into hell... Science fiction and love story.

Aside from French online merchants like alapage, there's not much to go on concerning this curious film. From what I can gather from the trailer, Florence (played by the ravishing Annette Stroyberg, who also happened to be married to Roger Vadim at the time --and indeed, she is best known nowadays as Vadim's woman between his trysts with Bardot and Deneuve) is either a woman who enjoys eternal youth, or some sort of automaton. She's surrounded by two creepy old men (played by French film stalwarts Jean Servais and Pierre Brasseur), who may be her servants, or former lovers who suffer being her servants merely to be in the glow of her incredible youth and beauty. The young scientist (Michel Le Royer), convalescing in her mansion after a motorcycle accident (a colleague warns him before his excursion: "A motorcycle is a dangerous toy", to which our hero replies, "I'm not about to get killed. I like life too much."), finds himself falling in love with the mysterious Florence. He also finds that he may enjoy eternal youth as well. As arch harpsichord music plays, she tells him: "We'll never grow old, Andre. We'll never be apart." Then we see a jetliner's engine blow and toss young Andre across a runway like an autumn leaf. And the trailer ends.

If this description of the trailer seems remarkably vague, it is because the trailer to Agent of Doom is remarkably vague. Is it a romance, a fantasy story, a spy tale, or some sort of melange of all of them put together? One suspects that the American marketers who put together this trailer were unsure themselves. I imagine their prime directive was to show as much of Annette Stroyberg's bare back as possible.

One interesting sidebar to this film is the story of the man who wrote the novel on which this film is based, L'Aventure Commence ce Soir, or The Adventure Begins This Evening. His name was Robert Collard, but he is best known by his pseudonym R. Lortac, one of France's first animators. Inspired by Winsor McCay's films while on a trip to the United States, he began making animated films in the late teens. Some of these were distributed as 9.5mm films meant for the home market in the early '20s (by Pathé Baby, the first manufacturers of home movie equipment, and who also sold ready to view movies for their system such as Lortac's films, and also Chaplin shorts and different chapters of Abel Gance's Napoleon), and it's in this small format that what's left of Lortac's early work survives. He also started making advertising cartoons in the early '20s, which could be considered the first commercials. In 1922, he began his "Canard en cine" series, which were satirical cartoons shown along with newsreels.

With the coming of the Depression in the 1930s and the advent of World War II, Lortac sold his animation studio and turned to a less taxing way to make a living, writing comic books and popular genre fiction. One of his comic book creations was Bibi Fricotin, a sort of Tintin in space. Another was a series published in Meteor Magazine, Les Conquérants de l'Espace (The Conquerers of Space), featuring the adventures of the space pilot Spade and his smart-talking mechanic Texas. He also started writing novels as Robert Collard, such as Les Bagnards du Ciel (Convicts of the Heavens), and the aforementioned L'Aventure Commence ce Soir. Little did people realize that this genre journeyman was also one of the pioneers of the animated film.

Yet more marginalia. The director of Un Soir... par Hasard, Yvan Govar, has been credited (accused?) by some genre fans as the director of the lost (never completed, or perhaps never even made) Paul Naschy werewolf feature Las Noches del Hombre Lobo (The Nights of the Wolfman). The story surrounding this non-film is fairly interesting, but best left for another time.

Glenn Branca

Streaming video hits you in the solar plexus! Here's a collection of performance videos from Glenn Branca and his electric guitar ensembles. Atonal and cool, and still going at it apparently.

Here's Inga!!

Mp3 Friday! Back with a vengeance! This week we present the rocking Middle of Nowhere by The Good Grief, the title tune of the 1968 Swedish skin flick Inga. (Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling) 1.8M

"The most acclaimed masterpiece of erotic cinema ever created!" claims the blurb on the cover of the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Joe Sarno's Inga, or, as it was known in Sweden, where it was produced, Jag - en oskuld (I, a Virgin). Surely another case of an adman's hyperbole, as the film, a taciturn soap opera with some nudity, clearly does not live up to its billing (what film could, really?). The blurb itself seems quaint, from a time (not that long ago) when the promise of art could be used to push sex, at least making it high-minded enough to make the sex seem respectable. Pick up a copy of any Playboy from the 60s, and in between the gatefold and "The Girls of Rio" pictorial, you would find Nabokov, Bertrand Russell, and Marshall McLuhan. Sex became the thinking man's sport. In the arts, loosening the bounds of decency statutes became the province of poets and prurient hucksters alike.

The sex films of the period exemplified this odd dichotomy. Filmmakers like Sarno and Radley Metzger had pretensions to art, but still had enough T&A to appeal to the raincoat crowd. Inga is not an exception. With its crisp b&w photography, Swedish locations, and Scandinavian quietude, some have made the comparison to Bergman. This is a stretch. While a lot of it is artfully done, it shows nothing that compares to Bergman's moral weight. It's essentially a story of a woman who attempts to pimp out her teenage niece to a wealthy publisher "who likes young girls" in order to have the money to keep her much younger boyfriend. The niece ends up sleeping with the boyfriend, and the aunt finds herself with nothing in the end. Not necessarily a bad story, but it would have been better without the arthouse pretensions. Better as a Sirk, not a Bergman.

The main title for Inga is the song "Middle of Nowhere", written by Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling, and performed by The Good Grief. A very fuzzy guitar lead snakes around a classic mid-60s "shake" beat. The lyrics (in English) offer a critique of the nihilism and angst of youth: "Everybody's playing, but nobody's really winning...It's a paradox, they don't know if it's joy or pain...Believing that their friends are in hell (spooky sound from the organ)...And where does it take you to, if you refuse to care...The middle of nowhere!" I'm assuming The Good Grief are Swedish. The heavy fuzz gives it away, along with the singer's accent. I found nothing about the band on the web. The imdb has The Bamboos listed (they're listed as The Good Grief in the credits). While I couldn't find anything about The Bamboos, there is a Swedish band called Bamboo, whose claim to fame is that it launched singer Mikael Rickfors' career, first as a member of the 70s version of The Hollies, then as a solo artist. So, are The Good Grief The Bamboos in disguise? Does anyone care? One of the song's writers is Clay Pitts. The only other credit I could find for him is the soundtrack for another sex film (from 1970) Female Animal. There's an interesting discussion about the Inga soundtrack on the Mobius Euro Cult Board (scroll down to Scoring with INGA), alas with no resolution.

Your Littlest Gauge

Long before the advent of DVD, and way before the days of VHS and Beta, the very idea of collecting feature films for home viewing was impractical, cumbersome and horribly expensive. Sure, some worthy and enterprising souls collected 35mm and 16mm prints of their favorite movies, but normally these collectors were theater owners or had access to the hardware needed to project these reels. For those of lesser means who still wished to keep at least a small taste of a memorable film experience, alternatives might include recording an audio cassette off the late, late show, commercials carefully edited out (as I had done, many years ago, when local TV used to broadcast movies instead of infomercials in the wee hours), or, for the more adventurous, film favorite scenes directly off the television with a Super 8 camera (which I also tried, although with not much success). Or you can do what most reasonable people did: buy edited highlights of their favorite feature in a 100 to 400 ft Super 8 reel. These would usually run from 7 to 25 minutes, and would sort of synopsize the movie's story in that allotted time. Some were sound, but most were silent. Sketchy intertitles would not only function to show dialogue, but also to completely do away with exposition and provide the merest wisp of context with the previous scene. Thus, the 30 minutes of plot, gags and happenings between two scenes in, say, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein can be reduced to a simple title: "After escaping Dracula, the boys find themselves in Frankenstein's lair".

These were highlight reels of your favorite movies, pure and simple. Cinema ESPN, if you like. An interesting question to pose, though: who were the editors of these expurgated editions? They were usually the employees of companies such as Castle Films (here's a nice history of Castle Films here), who bought a movie's rights from a studio, chopped them down to size, and then printed them in 8mm or Super 8 reels, often packaged in garishly designed boxes (here's a nice collection of images of these boxes). But these editors, how did they work? Did they study the full feature backwards and forwards in order to find the perfect abridgment? Or did they put in the exciting stuff, with no care at all to any semblance of narrative order? Did they follow a certain aesthetic?

Possibly the closest analogue to these truncated films are trailers, if only in the way a film can be distilled into an impossibly short length. Other than that, these little editions are quite unique, and, aside of a few collectors, pretty much forgotten. If one were so inclined, one could do an interesting study.